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Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an

Look, I'm a jazz player and do music pedagogy stuff. It's kind of silly to listen to Metheny about how to learn things, the dude was a complete prodigy (not an attack on your comment, just an aside). He was teaching at the most prestigious music school after attending for a year or some crazy thing. Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us, and most of them have no idea how to explain how they learn/teach in ways that are useful to regular brains. I've met some of them, and they might as well be a different species. (Synthesesia is often part of it, I did a master class with a pianist who was basically tripping the whole time he played, listening to him describe his experience was so completely un-relatable to normal people.) Some of those folks are also great teachers, but a lot of them just say the most completely useless advice because they can't even remember not being able to instantly play whatever they hear.

jdgoesmarching 5y ago
I’m not sure if you put Jacob Collier in this category, but I think his success has a lot to do with him attempting to make these higher abstractions of music more approachable.
- hammock 5y ago
  There is something to that. He reminds me of Eric Whitacre in a sense. Whitacre reached "genius" "prodigy" "best composer" status among amateurs and beginner musicians because he published his music with all kinds of markings on it (e.g. explicitly writing crescendi and diminuendi for every basic phrase, and notating all kinds of subtle tempo changes) that a well trained singer would already understand implicitly without need for the markings (which in my opinion as a well trained singer with his own sense of style, are annoying). The effect is to allow bad high school choirs to get to decent-sounding choral music.
laserlight 5y ago
> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some people’s wiring differently, but if one could become Mozart without special wiring maybe we shouldn’t count on the idea too much.
- asdffdsa 5y ago
  Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?
  - iainctduncan 5y ago
    No, if anything Peak was written as a response to Outliers, which grossly misrepresents Ericsson's work. Peak is his popular science version of his own work, presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the super-elite geniuses. Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.
  - laserlight 5y ago
    I haven’t read Good to Great, but have read other Malcolm Gladwell books. They are written to be sensational and popular, not scientific at all. Indeed Gladwell is the one who misrepresented 10000 hours of practice that Anders Ericsson identified as part of his research. Ericsson identifies 10000 hours as a ballpark around which proficient practicers have practiced in their career --- nothing like a prerequisite Gladwell portrayed it to be. To the contrary, Ericsson states that without deliberate practice, the number of hours of practice doesn’t matter. Peak is nothing like Gladwell books. I recommend it to everyone interested in practice and improvement.
    - iainctduncan 5y ago
      A good way to summarize it is: Gladwell implied that if you did 10k hours, you'd become world class, that's it! Ericsson identified that the most significant differentiator between the top performers at conservatories and the rest was how much of their lives they had spent doing rigorous practice. Those are two totally different things. To paraphrase Ericsson in a way that is meaningful for most people, he basically said "10k hours is the average we saw of our top performers" (10+ years, 3 hours a day). He in no way implies that doing that would make you world class, or that all world class performers had done it. He never says it's either necessary or sufficient - just what they observed their top subjects had done relative to their bottom ones, so if you want to get good, start there. There are people out there who are world class after playing half that, and scads and scads who aren't and have done more than double. I took a lot longer than 10 years to do my 10k+ hours, but by now at age 47 I've done them. So have most of my musician friends. We gig around town. lol. 10k is table stakes.
megameter 5y ago
The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles. For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away. All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.
geekster777 5y ago
I've struggled with the accuracy of statements like this as someone who writes a lot of music. Writing the melodies is always the easiest part (lyrics are the hardest). So how much is it brain wiring vs just practicing an order of magnitude or two more than most? I have thousands of hours spent improvising over random songs - just setting Spotify to shuffle and jamming to whatever pops up. It's fun for me, and something I generally do to procrastinate other work. I couldn't imagine someone practicing nearly as much if they didn't innately enjoy it. So it makes me wonder, is it fun because I'm good at it, or did I get good at it because I find it fun? I personally believe the latter, but it's hard to really tease apart the nature vs nurture in such a subjective art. It reminds me of comic artists trying to illustrate just how much art they have to produce to go from amateur to pro. Note, I don't mean to imply I'm part of that small elite you mention. I'm no prodigy, it's just that I've had many musicians (in far less competitive circles) express a similar sentiment about my skills.
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  What I'm saying is more that when people like Metheny say "you can't teach melody writing", they mean "no one could teach me melody writing, it's just there". And then they extrapolate to say "no one can teach anyone melody writing", which is complete nonsense. I can, guaranteed, teach a regular person tons on how to learn to write better melodies. Can I teach a Metheny how to improve his melodies? Of course not! (Nor will my improvisation ever by even remotely in his ballpark...) Because for me, they were never "just there". I learnt improvisation by listening, playing, memorizing, and analyzing over many years. It never came easy. So yeah, I know tons of the obstacles regular people will face, and lots of things that might get them unstuck. A really fascinating interview is the film of Bill Evans talking about this. Surprising, he says it was never easy for him either. So damn, he must have worked hard.

jdgoesmarching 5y ago

I’m not sure if you put Jacob Collier in this category, but I think his success has a lot to do with him attempting to make these higher abstractions of music more approachable.

hammock 5y ago
There is something to that. He reminds me of Eric Whitacre in a sense. Whitacre reached "genius" "prodigy" "best composer" status among amateurs and beginner musicians because he published his music with all kinds of markings on it (e.g. explicitly writing crescendi and diminuendi for every basic phrase, and notating all kinds of subtle tempo changes) that a well trained singer would already understand implicitly without need for the markings (which in my opinion as a well trained singer with his own sense of style, are annoying). The effect is to allow bad high school choirs to get to decent-sounding choral music.

laserlight 5y ago

> Music has a very small elite of people who's brains wired very differently and basically have super powers compared to the rest of us Anders Ericsson, known for his book Peak on deliberate practice, would probably disagree. He tells the stories of prodigies like Mozart, Shakespeare, and Tiger Woods. Common to all is an immersion with their practice from the early ages. Of course, this is not a proof against some people’s wiring differently, but if one could become Mozart without special wiring maybe we shouldn’t count on the idea too much.

asdffdsa 5y ago
Is "Peak" in the same vein as Malcolm Gladwell or "Good to Great" which preselects a handful of prodigies across all fields then makes broad, definitive (unscientific) conclusions based on some posthoc observations?
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  No, if anything Peak was written as a response to Outliers, which grossly misrepresents Ericsson's work. Peak is his popular science version of his own work, presumably to correct that. It's a good read, and can act as a guide to his actual academic papers. But bear in mind, it is still only as good as his studies, which were done on pre-professional players and athletes, not on the super-elite geniuses. Outliers is a complete piece of shit. No professionals take anything in that book seriously, it's cherry picked extrapolated nonsense by someone who wanted a good story and has no idea what he was talking about.
- laserlight 5y ago
  I haven’t read Good to Great, but have read other Malcolm Gladwell books. They are written to be sensational and popular, not scientific at all. Indeed Gladwell is the one who misrepresented 10000 hours of practice that Anders Ericsson identified as part of his research. Ericsson identifies 10000 hours as a ballpark around which proficient practicers have practiced in their career --- nothing like a prerequisite Gladwell portrayed it to be. To the contrary, Ericsson states that without deliberate practice, the number of hours of practice doesn’t matter. Peak is nothing like Gladwell books. I recommend it to everyone interested in practice and improvement.
  - iainctduncan 5y ago
    A good way to summarize it is: Gladwell implied that if you did 10k hours, you'd become world class, that's it! Ericsson identified that the most significant differentiator between the top performers at conservatories and the rest was how much of their lives they had spent doing rigorous practice. Those are two totally different things. To paraphrase Ericsson in a way that is meaningful for most people, he basically said "10k hours is the average we saw of our top performers" (10+ years, 3 hours a day). He in no way implies that doing that would make you world class, or that all world class performers had done it. He never says it's either necessary or sufficient - just what they observed their top subjects had done relative to their bottom ones, so if you want to get good, start there. There are people out there who are world class after playing half that, and scads and scads who aren't and have done more than double. I took a lot longer than 10 years to do my 10k+ hours, but by now at age 47 I've done them. So have most of my musician friends. We gig around town. lol. 10k is table stakes.

megameter 5y ago

The older I get, the more I'm attuned to the limitations of talent like Metheny. It's like how there are great mathematicians, and many of them can be strong problem-solvers and do great work, but can still fall short of "genius", because - and this is my hypothesis - they're too strong at tackling fine-grained details immediately, so they don't actively seek out the kind of abstractions that would lead to a different perspective. It's like trying to explain how you walk: "it's obvious." (even though at some point you did struggle with it) When I hear synthestites talk, they are trying to explain how walking works - it's tapping into neural pathways that are wired into the subconscious, skipping over any preliminary decoding. So they often create things that sound marvelous, bring in tons of techniques, but are at their core heavily improvised with minimal "concept" - elequent baby babbles. For the rest of us creativity is achieved by adapting between different symbolic contexts, and this helps us explain our results when we get them, and highlights using structural abstractions. So for example music with a heavy lyrical component usually isn't in the domain of the synthestetic prodigy, because it needs crossover between poetic/storytelling skills and musical ones. They can do it, but not with the same fluidity with which they can just "sit at the keys" and get swept away. All that said, I think Metheny's right about melody. There are tricks to improve what a melody communicates, but no particular formula can benchmark whether or not it works in the way that you can benchmark playing inside a rhythm, scale or harmony.

geekster777 5y ago

I've struggled with the accuracy of statements like this as someone who writes a lot of music. Writing the melodies is always the easiest part (lyrics are the hardest). So how much is it brain wiring vs just practicing an order of magnitude or two more than most? I have thousands of hours spent improvising over random songs - just setting Spotify to shuffle and jamming to whatever pops up. It's fun for me, and something I generally do to procrastinate other work. I couldn't imagine someone practicing nearly as much if they didn't innately enjoy it. So it makes me wonder, is it fun because I'm good at it, or did I get good at it because I find it fun? I personally believe the latter, but it's hard to really tease apart the nature vs nurture in such a subjective art. It reminds me of comic artists trying to illustrate just how much art they have to produce to go from amateur to pro. Note, I don't mean to imply I'm part of that small elite you mention. I'm no prodigy, it's just that I've had many musicians (in far less competitive circles) express a similar sentiment about my skills.

iainctduncan 5y ago
What I'm saying is more that when people like Metheny say "you can't teach melody writing", they mean "no one could teach me melody writing, it's just there". And then they extrapolate to say "no one can teach anyone melody writing", which is complete nonsense. I can, guaranteed, teach a regular person tons on how to learn to write better melodies. Can I teach a Metheny how to improve his melodies? Of course not! (Nor will my improvisation ever by even remotely in his ballpark...) Because for me, they were never "just there". I learnt improvisation by listening, playing, memorizing, and analyzing over many years. It never came easy. So yeah, I know tons of the obstacles regular people will face, and lots of things that might get them unstuck. A really fascinating interview is the film of Bill Evans talking about this. Surprising, he says it was never easy for him either. So damn, he must have worked hard.